It’s been eight years since the state legislature joined twenty-five others by passing a permitless concealed carry law. The bill’s sponsors along with the governor preferred calling it The Constitutional Carry Act as it sounds patriotic and doesn’t include the word “permitless.”
           Jonah Dowson saved up the birthday money from his aunt, the Christmas money from his grandmother, and put aside more from his two fast-food jobs until he had enough to buy a used Glock 17 and a half-dozen magazines.  If he had more money he would have bought a new Glock 19, and he wouldn’t still be living with his parents at the age of twenty-six.  He liked the gun store with its spectacular displays, the alluring semiautomatic rifles set at angles on the wall, the handguns arrayed under glass like diamond rings or gold bracelets.  The salesman was terrific, too.  He explained everything, answered all Jonah’s questions and never talked down.  He even threw in a three-month warranty on the used gun and a voucher for a month’s free membership at the local shooting range.  On top of all that, the man had a cool mustache, just like Lee Van Cleef’s in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; and, even though he probably had twenty years on Jonah, called him sir.  The Glock made Jonah feel powerful; the man who sold it to him made him feel respected.
           Jonah’s mother was born and raised in Alabama and never felt entirely at ease with Yankees. Jonah’s father was a Yankee; he was even a Yankees fan. He was recruited out of his New England high school by Wake Forest to play left tackle. Jonah’s mother was on the school’s cheerleading squad. Midway through their sophomore year, Jonah’s father’s grades made him ineligible and his mother was pregnant, so they dropped out and moved north. Jonah’s father was taken on by his uncle, got his plumbing license, and, when the uncle retired, he took over the business. He had one employee, two trucks, and worked six days a week, frequently all seven. Jonah and his father saw little of, and never had much to say to, one another, even less after the shouting match about Jonah’s future. That ended in a draw with Jonah swearing a solemn oath that he would never, ever be a plumber.
           Jonah’s relationship with his mother was another matter. She spoiled him, never stopped calling him my baby, and enjoyed ganging up with him against her husband. When he was in his teens, Jonah and his mother talked politics started talking politics, the kind he got from websites of the resentful and conspiratorial variety. They had a private call and response routine. “Liberal wimps,” he’d say.
           Damn Yankees,” she’d answer. “Arrogant elites,” he’d say, and she’d reply, “Liberal lunatics.” Then they’d laugh together.
           His mother made Jonah take the overweight daughter of her friend, Mrs. Belfiglio, to his senior prom. He didn’t object but did think he’d have had a better time going with his mother. There were girls he liked a lot better than Julie Belfiglio, but they didn’t like him.
           The voters elected a mayor who drew bike lanes and installed speed bumps all over the city, got the City Council to ban smoking in public parks, declared their town a sanctuary city, and used taxpayer money to house, feed, clothe, and educate refugees, including the undocumented ones. Jonah was angry and that his mother also deplored it all didn’t dampen Jonah’s growing rage. There were a lot of straws, but the last was the mayor’s self-righteous speech in support of Drag Queen Storytime delivered on the steps of the city’s neo-Gothic public library which had been paid for by Andrew Carnegie.
           Charles Kinsella was a competent accountant, not creative and a little slow, but reliable. At work, things added up, but not so well in life. His wife left him for a retired oral surgeon she met at the gym she joined to lose weight. The oral surgeon had plenty of money, ran marathons though he was fifteen years older than Kinsella. Kinsella’s ex was not petty. Though she took their modest saving account and the two mutual funds, she left him the house and the mortgage.
           Kinsella treated his loneliness with Bud Light, pornography, and chatrooms. He found that he enjoyed conspiracy theories, at first more for the online company than because he believed in them. But, over time, his politics narrowed, and his patriotism slid into nationalism. He paid a contractor to erect a flagpole in front of his two-bedroom ranch house and bought an American flag to hang from it, as though his house were an enclave on foreign territory, as if his neighbors weren’t citizens like himself. His favorite chatroom was a misogynistic one. Somebody posted a link to a lecture by a professor who had worked out how the degradation of men had begun in 1973, the year of the pull-out from Vietnam, Women’s Lib, MS. magazine, consciousness-raising, bra-burning, an epidemic of divorces, but also the year of the Arab oil embargo that kicked off a decade of inflation that made staying in the middle class require two incomes. He pointed out that the new economy put a premium on digital dexterity and devalued upper-body strength, how, between them, the Pill, Title Nine, girls’ soccer, and Roe v. Wade pushed the boulder down the hill. The professor compared sexual politics to a Swiss funicular, one car going up because the other was going down. He showed that affirmative action mostly benefitted white women and changed the student population of colleges and universities that set up status of women committees. He spoke of consent laws and the shattering of glass ceilings in corporations, in government.
           “It’s all a zero-sum game,” he concluded.
           For Kinsella, it added up like a balance sheet. His supervisor was a woman, newer to the firm than he was. The governor was a woman and one of the state’s senators. The new chair of the City Council was a make-up-free feminist who, in a TV interview with a fawning blonde reporter, cheerfully took her male predecessor apart and said that her favorite book was Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary?
           “I mean, for the title alone.” The Councilwoman chortled. The reporter giggled. Charles Kinsella seethed.
           In high school, Jonah had enjoyed plane geometry and sometimes history, especially the wars, but he dreaded English because it required reading and, worse, writing. So, composing his manifesto was a challenge—searching for the words, then they computer’s keys—but it was also exhilarating. He knew better than to show it to his mother, though he longed to and thought she’d appreciate it, would even be proud of him. He began, as he’d been taught, with an outline, the organizing principle of which was grievance. He listed all the bad things the mayor had already done and the worse things he’d do if he wasn’t stopped.
           Kinsella typed fast. The sentences came almost of themselves, one after another, like waves running up against a rocky shore. His theme was the feminization of America and the oppression and shouldering aside of men. He used a lot of rhetorical questions. “When was the last time you saw the noun masculinity not coming after the adjective toxic?” “Did Affirmative Action give a leg up to the minorities it was supposed to?” “Does trying to create an artificial equality undermine genuine merit?” “In a custody dispute between a neglectful mother and a devoted father, who’s going to win nine times out of ten?” He moved on to the tainting of the population with unassimilable and undocumented foreigners, a drain on public funds and a distortion of the electorate. He wrote of the duty to strengthen and affirm all that is good about the country which had to begin by denying and purging all that’s bad. The good was always old, the bad always new. What he wrote of the former read like a paean to the bland world of 1950s sit-coms, but it was cataloguing the latter that he really relished. He let loose. It felt good to call for a program of men’s liberation.
           The manifesto ran to twenty-four pages. After making all the corrections suggested by the automatic editor, he mulled over several titles before settling on All Downhill Since 1973.
           City Hall is a relic of the Gilded Age, like those of many cities that expanded and industrialized after the Civil War. It is in the Beaux-Arts style of the time, a mélange of Gothic Revival, Roman monumental, French Baroque, and Italian Renaissance, ornate and imposing rather than tasteful. Its ceilings are high, making it ferociously expensive to heat. The pile is rich in stairways, corridors, rooms of all sizes. The mayor’s office is on the top floor, the fourth, on the south side. The Council’s chambers are on the same floor but on the north side.
           Late in the morning of Wednesday, February 13, Jonah Dowson and Charles Kinsella, desperate and excited in their own ways, incensed and deranged to the same degree, mounted the twenty-three marble stairs to the huge double doors of the building. Jonah was left-handed, so he had his Glock in the left front pocket of his parka, three magazines in the right. Kinsella had his Hellcat in the right-hand pocket of his Navy blue peacoat, two magazines in the left.
           There were four policemen in vast lobby which, though vast in scale, was crowded with lawyers, office workers, deliverymen, students on a field trip, and anxious supplicants. Two of the policemen were gulping coffee from Styrofoam cups and chatting to each other; the others were greeting attorneys and bureaucrats they knew.
           Jonah trudged up the main staircase. Kinsella waited for the elevator. Jonah was charged with adrenalin and resolve. He was striding down the wide fourth-floor corridor to the mayor’s office when the elevator door opened next to him and ten people poured out, including Kinsella, also steeled for action, but disoriented. Instead of turning to the north side, he fell in behind Jonah heading south. He noticed the young man in the green parka was moving oddly, walking fast but looking unsteady. Kinsella hoped this guy wouldn’t complicate matters, wouldn’t mess up his plan, such as it was. He was worrying that getting to the mayor through the outer office might not be so easy.
           Before opening the heavy mahogany door, Jonah took a deep breath and drew his Glock. When he entered, he yelled at the staff behind their desktops, waiting at the copier, and gossiping by the windows. “Stay put! It’s him I’m here for, not you!” Not everyone froze as he had expected, so he fired a shot into the ceiling. A little snowfall of plaster fell as the screaming started and people scattered, diving under desks, overturning chairs.
           Kinsella stopped in the doorway, perplexed. “Him?” he thought and, without thinking, pulled out the Hellcat.
           A young woman reached from under a desk, fumbling for her phone. Jonah shot her in the shoulder. Shocked, acting on some atavistic impulse, chivalric fairy tales, biological imperative, or lifelong conditioning about the obligation to protect women, Kinsella leveled the Hellcat at the back of Jonah Dowson’s head and pulled the trigger. The report was unexpected, thunderous. The 9mm slug did what it was created to do. Jonah’s head exploded; his body crumpled. The screaming ticked up to a mad crescendo, reverberating off the walls and ceiling, then, suddenly, all noises ceased. Seconds later, the awful hiatus was ended by groans and whimpers.
Police in various uniforms swarmed in, then EMTs showed up so quickly they must have already been in the building. Kinsella chose the policeman who looked the oldest and handed over the Hellcat.
           He said only one word, “Here.”
           The mayor stuck his head out of his office and was told it was safe. He was pale, shaken, but managed a little speech to his traumatized staff, a mixture of sympathy and encouragement, neither wholly convincing. He stopped the police from taking Kinsella away at once.
           “We’re all more grateful than we can say, Mr.—?”
           “Kinsella. Charles. Uh, Chuck.”
           “Well, Mr. Kinsella, Chuck, we owe you everything. You’re our hero. I didn’t used to think so, but maybe the guy was right when he said the answer to a bad man with a gun is a good one with a gun. Look, the police need to debrief you, but you’ll be hearing from me soon. Your city is profoundly grateful.”
           A young cop slapped Kinsella on the back rather than into handcuffs. He was surrounded and led to the elevator through the crush in the corridor. The crowd was confused. Many assumed he was the villain, the shooter, and some swore at him.
           “This man just saved the mayor,” bellowed one cop and the news rippled through the crowd. Much the same scene was replayed in got the lobby.
           Kinsella was escorted down the twenty-two steps to a squad car with it blue lights spinning. He was driven siren-less a few blocks to the local precinct where everybody stood up and applauded. Two police, a man and a woman, both in plain clothes, put him in an interrogation room, brought him coffee, and offered a sandwich, which he declined. He couldn’t touch the coffee either. A tape recorder was switched on, those present noted, and Kinsella recorded his incomplete statement. He spoke rapidly because he was desperate to be done and go home.
           “Can I leave now?” he asked. “Not yet,” said the lieutenant in charge, which was the woman. There were some difficult questions to dodge, but, somehow, he kept his wits. “What were you doing in the mayor’s office?” “Why were you carrying those extra magazines?” “Do you know the shooter?”
           When, at last, he was finally released for the promised ride home, the pavement outside the police station was mobbed. There were reporters shouting questions, photographers with cameras, two TV vans, civilians holding up phones. He was shouted at from all sides. There was more clapping. Kinsella said nothing to anyone. He hustled into the police car.
           When he was dropped at home, he leapt from the car.
           “Like that flag up there,” one cop said.
           Kinsella mumbled his thanks, strode to the door, fumbled with his keys, dropped them, picked them up, made it inside, waved to the cops, closed the door behind him, dashed up the stairs, sat down at his computer and, mumbling an anxious prayer, deleted his manifesto.

Robert Wexenblatt is a professor at Boston University. He has published 22 books including fiction, essays, and poetry. A novel won the Indie First Prize for Fiction.